Remains of the Revolution

The post-Fidel era began in Cuba even before Castro stepped down. While traveling there remains a challenge for Americans, Cuba has been condoning some private enterprise (gingerly) and building tourism (boldly). John Graham samples the travails and treasures of a country at the tipping point

It is Wednesday night at Havana's Floridita bar and the place is already mobbed with tourists who seem perfectly happy to eat the mediocre food and pay six dollars (twice the going rate) for a watery daiquiri while listening to a pretty average salsa band working its way through "Guantanamera" for the zillionth time with a fixed grin on its collective face. At first glance, this could be a touristy tavern anywhere in the world—a long worn-oak bar, rickety tables—but it's Havana and the Floridita is no ordinary tourist trap. This is where Hemingway famously drank up to twelve Papa Dobles (giant daiquiris) a day while amusing visiting Hollywood hotshots like Spencer Tracy and Ava Gardner; and in case you doubt that, there are photos of him all over and a life-size bronze statue leaning on the bar at his favorite spot in the corner.

Because Havana has been caught in a time warp for half a century, it is not difficult to imagine Hemingway here, standing precisely where José Villa Soberón's bronze stands, before shambling off down the Calle Obispo toward his room at the Ambos Mundos hotel. The same 1950s cars are wheezing along the streets, the same buildings stand, although in vastly increased states of decrepitude, and this bar is still serving Papa Dobles well into the tropical night. Old Havana is a living, breathing movie set, a soundstage for a Spanish-language film noir.

This particular evening's cast of characters is an eclectic group of drinkers. Leonardo Padura Fuentes, author of popular detective novels, is engaged in animated conversation with the English academic Stephen Wilkinson, an expert on contemporary Cuban culture. Then there is Eliades Ochoa, the cowboy hat-wearing singer-guitarist of the Buena Vista Social Club, with his spiritual successors, Israel Rojas and Yoel Martínez, leaders of Buena Fé, a young music group; and Nick Van Gruisen, out from Britain as a supporter of the World Monuments Fund, talking to David Soul, ex-Hutch of Starsky and Hutch and more recently the star of the West End musical Jerry Springer: The Opera.

The conversation swoops and falls as the Cristal beers and daiquiris flow. Soul is planning a one-man show on Hemingway's last days in Cuba. Padura's most recent novel, Adiós, Hemingway, concerns a murder on the grounds of Finca Vigía, the writer's home. Van Gruisen, meanwhile, is lamenting his failed attempts to meet up with Eusebio Leal, the official behind the architectural restoration of Old Havana. You have it all here—art, music, literature, architecture . . . and rum. Welcome to Havana.

The topic of conversation that surfaces with predictable frequency is, of course, Fidel Castro, who had recently stepped down after nearly fifty years of rule. The Comandante en Jefe has been one of modern politics' greatest survivors: He was thirty-two when he took power and is now eighty-one, and during that time, ten American presidents have come and nine have gone, some of them instrumental in ordering a number of the six-hundred-odd assassination attempts that Fabian Escalante, his former security chief, claims were made against him. So one would imagine that Fidel's announcement would reverberate through the Cuban capital. But it doesn't. There are no big demonstrations, no public displays, no sign of Fidel's internal enemies raising their heads above the parapets to denounce him.

The reason, says Wilkinson, is that the post-Fidel era has already begun. For the past few years, Cuba has been tiptoeing into its next phase, planning agricultural reforms, engaging in joint ventures, building tourism. It is extremely difficult to obtain hard facts since the governance is still in the hands of a tight inner circle, but according to Wilkinson, much of the farmland is being turned over to private use (if not outright ownership), and agricultural representatives from nineteen U.S. states have visited the island. There is a healthy flow of European Union delegations, and recently the British architectural firm Foster & Partners and the French construction firm Bouygues were reported to be proposing significant developments. There also appear to be Canadians everywhere, and there's a lot of talk about building golf courses to lure upscale tourists. A decade ago, tourism surpassed sugar as the top foreign-exchange earner. The number of Europeans and Canadians adds up to two million tourists a year. American visitation has dropped by as much as eighty percent in the past five years, to as few as 25,000 travelers, thanks to the hassle of (illegally) connecting through a neighboring country to bypass U.S. passport controls, and—a huge inconvenience—the fact that Cuba withdrew the U.S. dollar from circulation in 2004.

Fidel has become a spectral voice in the background, providing a kind of ideological comfort to older, more sentimental citizens if not to the seventy-five percent of Cubans born since 1959. Even his writings, firmly fixed in the zeitgeist of another era, and his so-called reflections, which appear in the propaganda rag Granma, tend to dwell on decades-old events. Some have suggested that his is a death-in-rehearsal, his appearances reduced to staged photo shoots with handpicked acolytes such as Hugo Chávez, and published interviews with the likes of Naomi Campbell.

We haven't exhausted the subject, but the conversation in the Floridita inevitably ends and we stumble out into the steamy night. Van Gruisen and I decide to jump in a cab and we head for one of Havana's two Casas de la Música, in the manicured suburb of Miramar.

There is nothing manicured about this Casa. It is heaving with Havana hookers, most hanging around the entrance, pawing and cajoling every Western male who arrives, hoping to be paid in forex for their services. The muscle-bound bouncers ask if we want girls, and before we can answer, two highly perfumed women are at our side. We politely demur and slip inside unscathed. The audience is split between locals and foreigners, and only half the foreign men have hookers with them. (It is a reasonably safe assumption to make about any smoldering young woman in the company of a gringo with a paunch and a silly smile.) The live bands start later; in the meantime, the crowd is dancing to Armando, a DJ who plays salsa, timba (a fast-paced contemporary version of salsa), and Latinized hip-hop. The locals dance like wired Twyla Tharps, while the tourists move like bank managers who've had too much to drink, which of course many of them probably are and have.

After a couple more daiquiris, Van Gruisen and I decide that if we're not going to dance—and we are white men who really can't dance—we'd like to try another brand of music, so we head for La Zorra y el Cuervo, a basement jazz club near the Hotel Nacional. It reminds me of the Manhattan joints of the '60s and '70s, with people in black-rimmed glasses bopping their heads to post-bebop free jazz with a Latin tinge. The band leader is Yasek Manzano, a trumpet virtuoso and one of Cuba's many gifted young musicians. He provides a cool and cerebral end to our hectic night in a vivid, thrilling city.

I am here because I have fallen in love with Cuba and, more specifically, with Havana. Head over heels, if I am honest. This is my second visit in three months, and halfway through this daiquiri-infused night, I am already planning my third. But lest you regard me as a sentimental fool, let me couch my amour in a little pragmatism. Unlike Jack Nicholson, who arrived here in 1998 and proclaimed Fidel "a genius," I see a place that possesses a magnificent legacy architecturally, culturally, and spiritually but that has been suppressed and held back by fifty years of Socialist torpor. Far from being a genius, Fidel was a political anachronism for decades before he resigned. Holding on to l'illusion lyrique (the early, idealistic phase of the revolution) far beyond its sell-by date, he has dragged his talented, free-spirited people down with him. The Habaneros earn an average of sixteen dollars a month (plus meager state-financed rations), and although most have enjoyed a good education and many are skilled, there is little work for them outside tourism and the few service industries.

This has turned many of them into full-time hustlers—as we discovered on our city tour. Following a visit to the Partagás cigar factory, our guide led us to a cloakroom and presented boxes of Cohiba Siglo VIs for thirty-three dollars. It was an offer difficult to refuse, but we later found similar cigars for a quarter the price. Cubans don't call this stealing. They use the word arreglar, which, literally translated, means to rearrange, or búsqueda, which means a search.

That said, isolation has bequeathed Cuba a fascinating otherworldliness. Instead of corporate advertisements smeared across the landscape, billboards display revolutionary slogans—VENCEREMOS ("We Will Win") and PATRIA O MUERTE ("Country or Death")—and giant portraits of Che as sainted revolutionary and Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, et al as counterrevolutionary Satans. Tramps, beggars, and hookers are everywhere and are accepted as part of society. Forty-nine years (and counting) of stultifying socialism have created spectacular indifference to the concept of service—so much so that you can almost see the steam rising from tourists waiting for a plate of food or a drink.

Ironic, too, is the fact that the revolution's economic failures have saved Habana Vieja ("Old Havana") from the wrecking ball. In the last years of his rule, President Fulgencio Batista was planning to replace the old buildings with casinos, high-rise hotels, and nightclubs. Now, international organizations such as UNESCO and the World Monuments Fund are working with the Cuban government to save this magnificent neighborhood from the ravages of poverty and the Caribbean climate. Some 150 of Old Havana's buildings date to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 200 to the eighteenth, and more than 450 to the nineteenth, making Havana the best-preserved colonial city in the hemisphere. But an estimated nine buildings a week are collapsing citywide. A walk around Old Havana provides evidence enough of its fragile beauty: Starting in the oldest square, the Plaza de Armas, within half an hour you will have taken in the Governor's Palace, Havana's finest Baroque building; the open-air Doric temple El Templete, where the city was founded in 1519; and the magnificent Cathedral of San Cristóbal, described by the novelist Alejo Carpentier as "music turned to stone."

But if you want to see Havana alive and vibrant, not simply as an architectural showpiece, stroll along the Paseo de Martí on a Sunday afternoon. This marvelous boulevard, running for a mile from the Parque Central to the Malecón seawall, is a raised walkway of inlaid marble lined with laurel trees. It buzzes on a Sunday with locals strutting their stuff, dancing to boom boxes, playing dominoes, engaging in heated debate. In its people, in the sounds and smells of Havana, you sense the intrigue, the mystery, the untrammeled exoticism of a city that has moved to its own beat for centuries. Occasionally the stench of raw sewage wafts by, reminding you that this really is a dilapidated Third World city, not a film set. The decrepitude of the buildings also provides vivid reminders, as does the corpse of a dog long dead at the junction with the Malecón.

My most profound contact with the emotional landscape of Cuba came on a clandestine visit to the National School of Arts. This is a place that sums up the contradictions—the high aspirations, low achievements, and broken dreams—of Fidel's Communist utopia. It was here, on the site of the former Havana Country Club, that Fidel and Che chose to locate the epicenter of artistic and cultural excellence. In this cradle of Batista's decadence—163 acres of groomed lawns and lakes—the revolutionaries created a new arts academy, home to five disciplines: drama, music, plastic arts, modern dance, and ballet. Because of restrictions on imported cement and steel, it was constructed mainly of locally produced bricks and terra-cotta.

By the mid-'60s, the money started running out. The half-finished school fell into disrepair, becoming a weedy refuge for goats and chickens.

Now, decades later, with Cuba gradually embracing architectural rehabilitation, the project is being revived. Getting to see this splendid place proves difficult, but we manage to smuggle ourselves in with a photography student who has a persuasive way with the guards.

Once inside, the soaring ambition and the ultimate neglect of the site hits me all at once, and I find myself close to tears. This is not something I experience frequently, much less confess to. It had been raining, so the terra-cotta tiles glisten in the late-afternoon sunlight. Two students are practicing trumpet in one corner, and across the rolling lawns, a pair of dazzling dancers rehearse under the hawklike gaze of an instructor. More than a thousand students are currently enrolled, many of them foreign.

Van Gruisen arranges to meet with Lázaro Zamora Vargas, director of the school. Zamora says that the Cuban government is not looking for donations and that it has earmarked $24 million for the project, but we later learn that there is already considerable funding from outside. Like so many things in Cuba, the truth about the rehabilitation of the School of Arts is elusive.

To get a measure of what is happening elsewhere on the island, Van Gruisen and I hire a driver/guide named Oscar Otero. A former English teacher, Otero abandoned that profession out of financial desperation. I found people like him throughout Cuba—a hydraulics engineer working as a waiter, another teacher waiting tables in Havana, a doctor working as a gillie—and was constantly reminded of the folly of having a good education system when the economy cannot employ the graduates.

We head toward the old sugar towns of Cienfuegos and Trinidad, on the south coast. The autopista is in varying degrees of decay and use, and Oscar dodges giant potholes, horse-drawn carts, huge tourist buses, and wheezing old Ladas, sometimes all at once. Never mind: The two towns are a revelation.

Cienfuegos is a symphony of classical Spanish architecture, with an 1870 cathedral and the 1889 Teatro Tomás Terry, which is, rather amazingly, still named after a local slave-owning sugar baron. The Cuban Croesus, as he has been called, made his fortune, in part, by acquiring ailing slaves, treating them, and reselling them. As with so many of Cuba's grand buildings, the interior is slightly worn, but it is a beautiful creation constructed almost entirely of Cuban hardwoods. We walk in on a rehearsal of a local production that could have been taking place a century ago.

Trinidad, where we spend the night, is another stunning, slightly disheveled place of pleasure. Once the island's sugar capital—it is called the Valle de los Ingenios ("Valley of the Sugar Mills")—it's now all sleepy pastel-colored buildings and cobblestoned streets. But it explodes into life at night, when the Casa de la Música lights up—a swirl of music and dance in the small outdoor amphitheater. Tonight there is an audience of some 250, including 50 or 60 tourists, nearly everyone dancing as the twelve-piece band plays salsa, reggae, and Cuban hip-hop. All the joie de vivre of Cuba seems to be concentrated in this one moonlit spot—the heady exuberance of the music, the heat, the sensuality of the dancers, the uncomplicated friendliness of the people. Unlike Havana, which like all capitals has an undercurrent of hustle and sleaze, Trinidad seems the epitome of innocent pleasure—provincial people having a good time, and welcoming visitors.

This is what Cuba did to me on several occasions: It disarmed me. When three men sat right beside us at the Trinidad Casa, my first thought was that they might mug us. When they smiled, we smiled back nervously and mentally secured our wallets. But then all three stood, walked to the stage and took up their instruments—trombone, guitar, and drumsticks. They were being friendly, and we were paranoid tourists. (My naturally suspicious nature is vindicated later, when I fall victim to a credit card scam—but more on that later.)

In the morning, we head back to Havana, wending our way north into the verdant hills called the Alturas de Santa Clara, through small villages, past ox wagons pulling agricultural goods from one small settlement to another, past real cowboys on horseback.

Oscar, our guide, opens up a bit and talks about life in Cuba. He describes himself as a humanist and says that he is not a member of the Communist party. His sister, an economist, earns about fourteen dollars a month, plus an annual bonus of thirty-three dollars. Oscar admits that it's a struggle, although I do not once hear him criticize the government directly in the eight days we are together.

He prefers not to discuss politics, but when I mention names like Elizardo Sánchez, the anti-Fidel activist, he immediately falls back into partyspeak, saying that he is "totally at the disposal of the Americans." As with so many Cubans, his dislike of the United States is never far from the surface: "We have lived under the threat of invasion from the Americans all our lives," he says with total conviction.

When I ask if he is keen to travel abroad, he says, "It is not important. I am studying tourism at the moment and that is enough. . . ." And his voice trails off, as if he is not quite convinced. But I don't pursue it: Cubans have enough demons to wrestle without having Westerners badger them into saying things they are likely to regret. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Cuba is one of the world's most censored nations. The long-range impact of Raúl Castro's sudden removal, this spring, of restrictions on private citizens owning computers and cell phones remains to be seen.

We join the steady stream of tourist buses ferrying their cargo to one of the largest resort developments in the Caribbean: Varadero, which has more than fifty resorts, with about fifteen thousand rooms, and many charter flights that fly direct to the local airport (more than fifty flights a week from Canada alone). What visitors get is a cheap holiday on a clean, beautiful Caribbean beach—and the almost complete absence of Cubans. The locals have always been there, cleaning rooms and waiting tables and performing onstage, but until Raúl Castro lifted restrictions on March 31, they were not allowed to stay at tourist hotels, even if they could afford it.

So far, little has changed. On several occasions, we have to smuggle Oscar into off-limits establishments for a drink, and although he takes it all with a philosophical shrug, it reminds me a little of smuggling blacks into "whites only" places during the days of apartheid in South Africa.

We stop for lunch at a lavish mahogany and marble mansion in the Varadero area. Xanadu, built in 1929 by the chemicals magnate Alfred I. du Pont, occupies a prime location above the cobalt-blue Straits of Florida. The top floor has a lovely bar where we drink daiquiris before lunch on the veranda. In a casual conversation over tuna carpaccio and langoustine, Oscar drops his bombshell. Having spent the entire seven days quietly expressing his admiration for the political status quo, he announces that he is planning to emigrate to Canada.

Now? Just as things are beginning to change under Raúl?

Oscar doesn't want to say too much, but he hints that it is the constant scramble to survive in the no-can-do society (there is a saying here that if you have to ask, the answer is no) which has led to his decision. He certainly doesn't want to say any more than that. I'm left to speculate that if freedoms evolve quickly enough, Oscar may change his mind and find a way to remain in the homeland he so obviously loves.

We taxi back to the airport in a 1956 Oldsmobile driven by a cheerful fellow named Jorge. We sail past the other 1950s American limos, like so many gaily painted ships in a sea of automotive nostalgia, and feel satisfied with our time in Cuba. From a distance, the Olds looks shiny and well maintained, but up close you can see the rust patches, the broken bits, the rather tatty upholstery—a bit like Havana, really. Jorge grins happily the whole way, proudly declaring that his old Olds gets twenty miles to the gallon—to which end he constantly eases the stick shift into neutral along anything resembling a flat stretch of tarmac so he can save petrol.

A few weeks after arriving home in London, I discover that my bank account has been all but emptied. A quick study of the surprise expenditures—Miami's Cubano Pizza and El Presidente Hotel both feature prominently—confirm my suspicions that somewhere along the road in Cuba, hustlers got hold of my credit cards and cloned them, but it was probably more a case of arreglar or búsqueda than outright theft. And it won't stop me from going back.